* NEWS COMMENTARY FOR JULY 2015: After 20 months of negotiations,
including a fair amount of overtime, on 14 July 2015, Iran agreed to a deal
with the "P5+1 group" of world powers -- the US, UK, France, China, and
Russia, plus Germany -- to restrain its nuclear program, in return for the
lifting of crippling sanctions.

The deal involves constraints on the uranium enrichment facilities at Natanz
and Fordo; a drastic reduction in the Iranian uranium stockpile, with limits
on enrichment levels; redesign of the reactor at Arak so it can't produce
weapons-grade plutonium; and open access to sites by the International Atomic
Energy Agency (IAEA) -- though the judgement of an arbitration panel may be
required for access to military sites. Sanctions will not be lifted until
the IAEA confirms that Iran has implemented its part of the bargain.

The arms embargo will be retained for five years, with a ban on ballistic
missile technology to continue for up to eight years. The deal is not
indefinite, with Iran in principle free to go its merry way in no more than
15 years; but the belief is that, if the Iranians become convinced they
doesn't need the Bomb to ensure national security, they won't be inclined to
go through all the expense and trouble of developing one. The Bomb, after
all, is a useless weapon in any tactical terms, and comes with at least as
many liabilities as advantages. Besides, if Iran does go nuclear, nobody
could have any doubt that sanctions will be imposed again, and they weren't
any fun the first time around.

The deal with Iran is an historic achievement for the Obama Administration,
on the same level as the ObamaCare national health plan. Not everybody is
happy about it, of course; the Israelis have blasted the deal, one minister
saying that it gave Iran "a free pass in developing nuclear weapons." That
was to be expected, while the inspection components of the deal suggest that
it's hardly a "free pass".

Congressional Republicans may yet scuttle the deal, but the smart money is
that they won't; for all their complaints, they've never been able to
realistically propose a better deal, and they know there's no public support
for war. They will need a two-thirds majority to override a presidential
veto, and it's unlikely they'll get it. Chris Christie, Republican governor
of New Jersey and a presidential hopeful, said that he would not seek to
overturn the deal -- realizing the obvious fact that, whatever its
limitations, it is much better than the alternatives.

The Saudis and America's other Sunni allies aren't so afraid that Iran will
get the Bomb; their problem is with the lifting of sanctions. The trouble,
from their point of view, is that Iran will economically recover, making it a
more dangerous foe in the ancient battle between Sunni and Shia for regional
dominance. The White House could not dispute that, but would have to reply:
"That's a separate problem." Such is international politics; and besides, a
prosperous Iran, focused on regional or even global trade, may well be less
inclined to stir up trouble. Overall, it's bad for business.

* In further dark comedy over the US National Security Agency (NSA) spying on
the governments of American allies: as reported by THE ECONOMIST, in late
June, the French government issued protests in response to a report that the
NSA was monitoring the communications of French leadership. However, the
French are noted for a certain realism -- some might unkindly call it
"cynicism" -- and the complaints had the sound of: "We are shocked!
Shocked! Deeply shocked!"

Philippe Hayez, a former French intelligence officer, commented that the
indignation "is surprising, because political authorities know their
communications are intercepted." The French ambassador to Washington tweeted
that "all diplomats live with the certainty that their communications are
tapped." Diplomatic missions perform some degree of intelligence gathering
as a normal practice, and so they are kept under some degree of observation
by host countries as a normal practice. There is nothing that resembles a
higher authority to set and enforce rules in international relations, and so
the only rules observed are those established by mutual convention --
"gentlemen's agreements" that are ambiguous, and not all that consistently
observed.

The French are very aware of US surveillance activities, because the two
countries cooperate closely on counter-terrorism and share intelligence. The
French government is also known to have conducted its own mass surveillance
of internet communications; and even as a fuss was being raised over NSA
actions, the French Parliament was approving a new intelligence law that gave
their own snoops expanded powers of surveillance and metadata analysis. The
measure was pushed through in response to the vicious islamist attack on the
office of the Charlie Hebdo publication in January, with strong support on
both sides of the aisle. The French take terrorism deadly seriously, and
they are not overly fussy about niceties in coming to grips with it.

It cannot be denied there are real issues with internet surveillance, but
trying to dig into them suggests that anyone seeking a fundamental fix will
become lost in a maze of shadows, ambiguity, secrecy, and contradiction; that
in the end, all the authorities will do is "arrest the usual suspects", and
then continue as before, with some minor changes in policy. Who could
sensibly blame them? If they face being pilloried for surveillance, they
know they'll get it worse if they let a terrorist attack slip through that
the critics will insist they should have been able to see coming.

* GIMMICKS & GADGETS: On 13 July, Mozilla disabled the use of the Adobe
Flash multimedia player software in the Firefox browser. Mozilla's action,
provoked by recent security breaches due to problems in Flash, was its
effective death knell, Facebook officials calling for Adobe to announce a
discontinuance date. YouTube now uses HTML 5 by default for playing videos.
Flash still persists for the moment, but everyone can now see the writing on
the wall, the Flash bashing being loud and shrill.

As for myself, I was a bit surprised to find out Firefox had turned off
Flash, but I was hardly unhappy about it. When I bring up the websites I
normally check each morning, it was nothing unusual for one of them to hang
up on playing Flash media, bringing my PC more or less to a halt until the
Flash player timed out. Hopefully, in the HTML 5 world of the future, web
browsers will be able to more consistently step on automatic playing of audio
and video.

When Apple came out against Flash on its mobile systems some years ago, there
was a tendency to see it as another example of Apple's imperious
determination to keep their products in a walled garden -- but even then, it
could be seen that Apple had a point, that Flash was klunky. It looks much
more unarguably klunky now. In a few years' time, Flash is going to be all
but history, and nobody but Adobe will regret its passing.

I might add that Mozilla's suspension of Flash was, to my disappointment,
only temporary, amounting to no more than a warning shot. However, it did
provoke me to see if there was some way I could then suppress Flash myself,
and quickly found a plug-in to do the job.

* As discussed by BLOOMBERG BUSINESSWEEK, the push towards robot cars has to
overcome a huge hurdle before they become reality: they have to be properly
tested to make sure they're safe, with testing being a major engineering
challenge in itself.

To help meet the challenge, a 9.3 hectare (23 acre), $6.5 million USD test
facility named "M City" has now come into operation at the University of
Michigan in Ann Arbor. M City -- which is a collaboration of of the
Transport Research Institute at the university, the Michigan Department of
Transportation, plus major automakers like Ford and Toyota -- features 40
building facades, angled intersections, a traffic circle, a bridge, a tunnel,
gravel roads, and an assortment of obstructed views. It even has a four-lane
highway, with entrance and exit ramps, to test how robocars will handle
merging traffic.

"Mechatronic pedestrians" will occasionally pop out to test the ability of
robocars to spot them and react in time. The facades can be easily
rearranged to present more challenges; the harsh Michigan winters will also
stress robocars, whose sensors don't always cope well with poor visibility.
In addition, M City will provide an environment for testing road
infrastructure related to robocar operation, particularly wireless technology
to back up or replace traditional road signs and traffic controls. Says
Peter Sweatman, who oversees the exercise: "We've been inundated with
requests for visits and demonstrations."

* As discussed by an article from WIRED Online blogs ("In Less Than Two
Years, A Smartphone Could Be Your Only Computer" by Christina Bonnington,
10 February 2015), chip-maker ARM has now released the Cortex-A72 CPU and
Mali-T880 GPU. The new CPU provides fifty times the processing power of
a chip from five years ago, at only 25% of the power draw of chip from
three years ago. Other new chipsets have similar specifications.

ARM officials believe that in two years, a smartphone will have all the power
of desktop PC, and will be the only computing device most users will need.
All that will be needed is some way to conveniently hook up the smartphone to
a keyboard and full-sized display. It's not very convenient to do that right
now, but in a few years it may be possible to set a smartphone down in a
cradle, where it is wirelessly charged up by induction, and hooks up
automatically to a display and keyboard. The desktop environment would
likely have more than just the display and keyboard, providing a USB hub and
mass storage as well.

Right now, even a souped-up smartphone doesn't run desktop apps very well --
but Microsoft is developing standards for "universal apps", which will
automatically adjust to whatever environment they're run in. Microsoft has
been bringing up the rear in the computing business for the last decade or
so, but if the firm can get a leg up on the integration of mobile and desktop
environments, or for that matter video players or game boxes, they may come
to the forefront again. The only problem there is that Microsoft is
effectively shut out of the phone market, the iPhone controlling the top end,
Android controlling the bottom end; one wonders if this is a problem with any
solution.

* THE HYPE CYCLE: An editorial by Babbage, THE ECONOMIST's rotating
technology columnist ("Divining Reality From The Hype" 27 August 2014),
focused on technology cycles and how, as they are becoming ever more rapid,
they are increasingly under the influence of hype.

The pioneering analysis of the industrial technology cycle was performed by
the Russian economist Nikolai Kondratieff in 1925. A "Kondratieff cycle"
begins when new technologies emerge: steam, rail, steel, and telegraphy in
the mid-19th century; electricity, chemicals, and the internal combustion
engine in the early 20th century. Investment is pumped into the new
technologies, businesses are set up to churn them out, and economic activity
grows.

As the market for the new technologies becomes established, weaker businesses
are forced out, with production by a set of established players. Over time,
the market softens, with economic activity declining and businesses gradually
dropping out. New technologies then arise that displace the old ones, and
the cycle starts over. Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter described the
cycle as "creative destruction".

Kondratieff observed that, in his time, such cycles lasted about 50 years or
so. By the 1990s, the cycle time had been reduced to half that; and now it
appears to have been cut in half again. The more technology we have
developed, the more quickly new technologies emerge, all the more so because
of 21st-century communications networking. Businesses have had to work ever
harder to keep up with the competition.

The speed of the technology cycle in the modern day creates a number of
problems, a significant one being the difficulty of determining the viability
of a new technology. It is nothing new to place a bad bet on a technology
that doesn't take off as expected, but it's easier than ever to make such a
blunder today. Gartner, an information-technology consultancy based in
Connecticut, has created a set of decision-making tools based on a "hype
cycle", with the company providing assessments of where current technologies
are in the cycle, and the prospects of emerging technologies at the entry
threshold of the cycle. The cycle has five phases:

Phase 1, "Innovation Trigger": The news media starts to play up a new
technology, though no usable product currently exists.

Phase 2, "Peak of Inflated Expectations": Businesses jump into the
market, some of them achieving success, and generating more headlines.
Failures don't get so much media attention.

Phase 4, "Slope of Enlightenment": The technology matures, with the bugs
worked out, and "trailing edge" adopters seeing its merits.

Phase 5, "Plateau of Productivity": The market becomes stable, with
the technology widely used, and manufacturers competing on the basis of
specialized refinements and business models.

The market will stay on the plateau until the technology is displaced by a
new one. It should be noted that most of the firms that jumped into the
market early do not survive to the maturity of the market.

As a cautionary tale, Gartner points to 3D printing, showing that it actually
focuses on two different markets: industry / enterprise, and consumers. They
are entirely different markets. First, there are 40 or so established
manufacturers selling enterprise-class 3D printers to business for $100,000
USD and up. In contrast, more than 200 start-ups are hoping to crack the
consumer market with 3D printers priced as low as several hundred dollars.

In addition, 3D printing is not a single technology, instead being a
combination of seven different ones, and none of it has been refined to the
point where it is seriously viable for consumer use. Pete Basiliere,
research vice-president at Gartner, comments: "Hype around home use
obfuscates the reality that 3D printing involves a complex ecosystem of
software, hardware, and materials, whose use is not as simple as hitting
[the] PRINT [button] on a paper printer."

3D printing has become established in industry for making prototypes, and it
is increasingly used in direct manufacturing -- for low-volume parts, or for
parts difficult to make with injection molding or other traditional
manufacturing processes. The most that can be done with home 3D printers at
present is to turn out little plastic toys or other trinkets; it's a hobbyist
market right now, in the hands of people who simply like to play with 3D
printing, and don't care that they could buy such trinkets much more cheaply
at a store.

Basiliere suggests that consumer 3D printing is five to ten years from
widespread adoption; that may be optimistic. It is inevitable that factories
will make increasing use of 3D printing, but when a home might have a 3D
printer that could amount to anything more than a toy is anyone's guess.

ED: I think my favorite example of the hype cycle was the big media push
over diamond-coated blades in the 1990s. I was really looking forward to
having a razor that never went dull. Alas, although it appears there
has been progress in diamond technology, I am still waiting.

* 5G PHONE REVOLUTION: As discussed by an article from THE ECONOMIST
("Your Phone On Steroids", 30 May 2015), new mobile phone networks arise
about once every decade. The first generation, arising around 1980, was
based on analog technology. The second generation, which arrived around
1990, went digital; while the 3rd generation, entering around the turn of the
century, dropped circuit-switching for packet-switching: instead of keeping
a channel open between two users, their conversations were broken up into
chunks -- packets -- and sent interleaved with packets from other
conversations.

The fourth generation, arriving about 2010, embraced internet protocol (IP)
technology, giving mobile phone users at least some degree of broadband
access. Mobile phone companies are now discussing what the 5th generation
(5G) is going to look like, the issue being escalated by the arrival of
powerful outsiders, such as Google and Facebook, into the mobile phone
business.

The simple goal will be instantaneous and high data-rate communications. 3G
networks still persist; they have a "latency" (response time) of up to half a
second. 4G networks cut that to a tenth; 5G networks will have to cut it to
a hundredth. They will also need data rates with a baseline of 1 gigabit per
second (GBPS), evolving to several times that. Current 4G networks, based on
"long-term evolution (LTE)" technology, can handle about 10 to 100 megabits
per second (MBPS). LTE is a patchy technology, some vendors pushing marginal
schemes, some vendors now introducing the full-fledged "LTE advanced", which
claims to be able to handle 1 GBPS -- but only on a burst basis, more like
250 MBPS on a continuous basis. In any case, the growth curve suggests that
gigabit speeds will be available in the next decade.

Two technologies -- "carrier aggregation" and "multiple input multiple output
(MIMO)" antennas -- help LTE advanced support high data rates, and are likely
to figure prominently in 5G technology:

Carrier aggregation operates by obtaining signals from multiple base
stations, instead of just the most powerful one in the vicinity. The
effect is of combining several small "pipes" into one fat pipe. The
individual pipes may be operating on different frequencies. We're
getting tighter and tighter on spectrum, and so it pays to make the best
use of it.

MIMO is also focused on making better use of bandwidth, using multiple
antennas to pull in a data stream. Right now, MIMO typically involves
three or four antennas, but there's nothing in principle to prevent the
use of hundreds.

Better use of bandwidth leads to the question of what band 5G will use.
Contemporary wireless devices use the crowded 700 megahertz (MHz) to 2.6
gigahertz (GHz) band of the radio-frequency spectrum. It's not like 3G and
4G users will go away immediately when 5G is introduced, and so it's
problematic to fit it into the current "very high frequency (VHF)" band. The
apparent answer is for 5G to move from the VHF band to the "super high
frequency (SHF)" between 3 and 30 GHz, or even to the "extremely high
frequency (EHF)" band at 30 to 300 GHz. The current residents of the
"millimeter wave" region include satellite TV, microwave communications
relays, air traffic control links, radio astronomy, and amateur radio.

There is also a sub-band in the EHF range, around 60 GHz, that has been
designated in most of the world for public use without a license -- for
short-range wireless communications, notably wi-fi links. Obviously, 5G will
have to leave that sub-band alone, but current developments in wi-fi hint at
what can be done for 5G. The latest wi-fi standard, 802.11ad, can support 6
GBPS or better around the home, enough to support ultra-high-definition video
feeds. Finnish networking firm Nokia has tinkered with links that can do 115
GBPS in the lab.

Such high frequencies have drawbacks, one being that they are easily blocked
by walls, even by people getting in the way. They also are absorbed by the
atmosphere, but only beyond ranges of about 100 meters. Above 70 GHz,
atmospheric absorption is less of a problem, but rain can cause fading.

The implication is that 5G will need a much denser network of base stations
than required for current cellphone technology. Current "microcells", no
bigger than wi-fi modems, point the way; they're used in buildings where
reception is a problem. The 5G revolution will require little base stations
everywhere, fixed to streetlights and to buildings. It will be a nuisance to
set up -- but few will regret the passing of the notoriously unsightly
cellphone tower.

* THE TAMING OF THE CHICKEN (1): We have a fair grasp of the history of
the domestication of animals such as the dog, cat, cow, and horse, but as
discussed by an article from AAAS SCIENCE ("In Search Of The Wild Chicken"
by Andrew Lawler, 23 November 2012), the domestication of the chicken remains
somewhat mysterious. Americans ate 16 billion kilograms (36 billion pounds)
of chicken in 2009, with chicken becoming more popular in the developing
world as well -- and so it was no surprise that it was the first farm animal
to have its genome published, back in 2004. Given the continued growth of
factory farms and the shrinkage of chicken genetic variation, there have been
worries that avian influenza or some new pathogen could have devastating
effects on this important food supply.

That has led to continued interest in chicken genetics, one consideration
being the genetic changes the bird has undergone in the course of its
domestication. In the course of such investigation, researchers have also
been seeking the answer to a puzzle that fascinated Charles Darwin: When,
where, and how was the chicken domesticated?

It is generally believed that the colorful red jungle fowl (Gallus
gallus), an inhabitant of South Asia, is the ancestral species of the
domestic chicken (Gallus gallus domesticus). That's about as much as
anyone agrees on, however. Was domesticated 4,000 years ago; or as long as
8,000 years ago? Was it domesticated once; or multiple times? And ever
since Darwin, there's been an academic dispute over whether three other wild
fowls contributed to the genome of the domestic chicken. There's also
uncertainty that what we think is the red jungle fowl is a truly wild species
any more, or that it's just a mutt of wild and domestic fowl.

Genomic studies are now digging up the answers, one paper suggesting that two
different wild fowls contributed to the domestic chicken genome, another that
the bird was domesticated separately in multiple regions. Researchers are
studying wild fowl populations across South Asia, and canvassing museums to
find old specimens for sequencing; some researchers are even trying to
extract DNA from old chicken bones for clues. Curiosity is driving the
effort -- but once again, chickens are big business, and understanding the
birds better may help produce better chickens.

* Charles Darwin's eccentric grandfather Erasmus Darwin was one of the first
to suggest that the red jungle fowl was the ancestor of the domestic chicken.
Charles followed up the suggestion with one of his typically meticulous
description of the jungle fowl's characteristics, and postulated that the
chicken was domesticated in India, to then spread around the world. With
equally typical cautiousness, he added that "sufficient materials do not
exist for tracing the history" of the bird.

The red jungle fowl ranges from the western foothills of the Himalaya
Mountains to the tip of Sumatra. In contrast to the domesticated chicken,
all roosters have colorful plumage; the hens don't have combs; both genders
have thin, dark legs, and can fly fair distances. The jungle fowl is also
only about half the size of a White Leghorn domesticated chicken, but the two
species can interbreed easily.

The domestication of the red jungle fowl was obviously not straightforward,
because is very shy and hard to approach. However, once the threshold of
association with humans was crossed, the jungle fowl took readily to the
domesticated life. The jungle fowl lives by day on the forest floor, eating
insects, seeds, and fruits; by night, it nests in trees, to escape its many
predators. That's not so far from the lifestyle of the domestic chicken, of
pecking around the barnyard in the day, safe in a coop at night. From the
human point of view, the fowl provided meat, eggs, and feathers, as well as
entertainment with cockfights. It could eat almost anything, and it was
portable -- where humans could go and live, it generally could as well.

But when and how was it adopted? Bones and artifacts at Indus River valley
sites south of the jungle fowl's range demonstrate the existence of
domesticated birds in 2000 BCE, reinforcing Darwin's suggestion of a single
domestication event in India. However, in 1988 a Chinese find seemed to
place domestication as far back as 6000 BCE -- though that discovery was
controversial.

The introduction of genetic sequencing tools in the 1990s promised to help
resolve the controversy, but the immediate result was just more controversy.
Obtaining the chicken genome in 2004 was all very well and good, but tracing
out the chicken's ancestry meant obtaining genomes from remains, or from
candidate wild ancestral species.

Early on, researchers focused on "mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA)", the separate
small genome found in the cellular organelle named the mitochondrion,
common to all multicellular organisms. In 1994, an ornithologist named
Akishinomiya Fumihito -- a prince of Japan's royal family, incidentally
-- claimed that mtDNA from Thai red jungle fowl suggested a single
domestication event in Thailand. In 2002, another team used mtDNA from
native Chinese chickens to back up that notion.

However, in 2006 a team led by Yi-Ping Liu of China's Kunming Institute of
Zoology performed a thorough analysis of the mtDNA of a large sampling of
wild and domestic modern birds. The analysis revealed nine distinct "clades"
-- subgroups derived from a single ancestral population -- that suggested a
distinct and separate expansion of lineages in southern China, Southeast
Asia, and the Indian subcontinent, supporting a multiple origins theory.
Recent research has backed up this finding, but few believe the matter has
been settled. [TO BE CONTINUED]

* THE COLD WAR (76): The uproar over Sputnik was a purely manufactured
crisis. There was no particular public concern over the matter, at least for
the moment; it was driven by the Democrats and hardline Republican critics of
the Eisenhower Administration on one side, along with the sensationalism of
the news media on the other. Reporters were normally friendly to the
president, but in a press conference on 9 October, they hectored him over
Sputnik 1, a reporter demanding:

BEGIN QUOTE:

Mr. President, Russia has launched an earth satellite. They also claim to
have had a successful firing of an intercontinental ballistics missile, none
of which this country has done. I ask you, sir, what are we going to do
about it?!

END QUOTE

Eisenhower tried to explain how the US was working on a satellite for the
IGY, saying that the effort had never "been considered a race", while
missile work was going at high priority. He correctly pointed out:

BEGIN QUOTE:

... the value of that satellite going around the earth is still problematical
... if we were doing it for science, and not for security, which we were
doing, I don't know of any reasons why the scientists should have come in and
urged that we do this before anybody else could do it.

... I think that [the Soviets] have fired objects a very considerable
distance, but I don't know anything about their accuracy, and until you know
something of their accuracy, you know nothing at all about their usefulness
in warfare.

END QUOTE

The president was wasting his breath. Eisenhower grasped power firmly but
discreetly, preferring to get things done out of the spotlight, inclined to
obfuscation when it suited his purposes -- all of which had the unfortunate
effect of giving the public impression that he wasn't really in charge, being
more interested in his golf game. Now, he came across as simply clueless.
The loud barking didn't let up; it got worse on 3 November 1957, when the
Soviets put the second Earth satellite, "Sputnik 2", into orbit.

Sputnik 2 was a much more elaborate affair than its predecessor, weighing
about half a tonne, and carrying a dog named Laika. The Soviets had been
launching dogs on sounding rocket flights using their R-2 missile; Korolyev,
always on the lookout for the main chance, had leveraged the dog support pods
developed for those tests into the new satellite. The Soviets were fond of
using dogs for test flights, incidentally, employing mutts for the job,
finding them hardy and easy to work with. The satellite overheated and Laika
suffered an unpleasant death, but there was no provision for recovery anyway;
TASS, the Soviet state news outlet, reported that Laika had been painlessly
killed by being fed poisoned food.

First Sputnik; now "Muttnik"; and the US hadn't even flown a satellite yet.
The manufactured crisis began to pick up momentum with the American public.
Although the Navy's Vanguard was still on track, von Braun's Army team was
given the green light to go ahead with their launch; they threw themselves
into the work with a vengeance. In the meantime, although Eisenhower was
exasperated with the uproar over the Sputniks, he did bow to suggestions that
he could use a science advisor. Harry Truman had set up a "Science Advisory
Council" in 1951 to provide insights on military technologies; Eisenhower
then upgraded it to a "President's Science Advisory Council (PSAC)", with the
PSAC becoming part of the White House organization on 21 November.

James Killian of MIT was made chair of the PSAC; the press immediately
labeled him the "rocket czar", much to his annoyance. Killian was familiar
enough with government bureaucracy to realize that a "czar" was merely
political excess baggage -- not part of, nor with any real authority over,
any government organization. A "czar" might be humored at best, pointedly
ignored and snubbed at worst. The PSAC's job was as specified, to advise the
president. Eisenhower was not actually caving into to pressure in
establishing the PSAC, he often had multiple agendas: he wanted counsel from
those with mindsets differing from those of Strauss, Teller, and others
embedded to the government defense establishment, and devoted to it to the
near-exclusion of any other concern. [TO BE CONTINUED]

* WINGS & WEAPONS: New drones appear all the time, many of them being
hard to tell apart, but a US startup named Dragonfly Pictures INC (DPI) is
introducing something a bit different -- the "DP-14 Hawk" helicopter
drone, which uses the tandem-rotor scheme associated with the Boeing Chinook
helicopter. The DP-14 is large by the standards of helicopter drones, with a
length of 4.1 meters (13.5 feet) and a maximum payload of 204 kilograms (450
pounds), either in its internal cargo bay or externally. It is aimed at
applications ranging from agricultural aerial spraying to air supply of
military forward operating bases.

The DP-14 will be powered by either a Solar T62 turboshaft with 65 kW (87
SHP) or Microturbo eAPU turboshaft with 100 kW (133 SHP), burning heavy fuel.
It will have an autonomous navigation system, using GPS guidance. DPI is
expecting initial flights in 2016; the company is already selling a smaller
tandem-rotor drone, the "DP-12 Rhino".

According to a DPI official: "We think tandem designs hold a lot of
advantages over single rotors, which are like most of the [drones] you see
today. Single-rotor [drones] do not necessarily work as well in certain
applications, especially when you have to fly somewhere remote where you
don't really know what the terrain is like. The tail rotor is what gets
damaged by debris, plants and bushes. Tandem rotors are higher and have a
wider center of gravity, offering greater loading flexibility."

ED: The original article had the DP-14 as the "Pelican", but when I checked
the DPI website, it was "Hawk". Why the change? I suspect it was a
trademark collision.

* The US Marine Corps (USMC) has committed to the Bell-Boeing MV-22 Osprey
tilt-rotor transport as their primary vertical-lift machine, with plans to
obtain a total of 360. Since no self-respecting Marine wants gear that
doesn't shoot back, the service has been performing experiments in fitting
the Osprey with offensive armament.

Initial experiments involved fitting a launcher for 70-millimeter
laser-guided rockets to the forward fuselage. Second-phase experiments
involved dropping tube-launched weapons -- the Griffin small guided missile
and the Switchblade loitering attack drone -- out the tail ramp. No doubt
the Marines are considering a more effective launch system, such as the
"derringer door" used on C-130 Hercules to drop tube-launched weapons. The
MV-22 will be able to provide fire support without requiring forward support
bases, as needed by the AH-1Z helicopter gunship.

* As mentioned in earlier installments of this column, the Japanese have been
interested in obtaining the MV-22, with an eye towards use on their
helicopter carriers. The "other shoe" has now dropped, the State Department
having approved the sale of up to 17 MV-22B Block C machines to the Japanese
Ground Self-Defense Force (JGSDF), for "humanitarian and disaster relief
capabilities and support amphibious operations." The Japanese have now
ordered an initial five machines from Bell Boeing.

The MV-22B Block C is operated by the USMC. Compared to earlier variants, it
features a weather radar; improved environmental controls; an enhanced
electronic countermeasures suite, including including chaff and flare
dispensers to defeat both surface-to-air and air-to-air threats; upgraded
cockpit displays; and rear cabin displays. No doubt, Marine investigations
of armament options are of some interest to the JGSDF.

* ONE STEP AHEAD: As discussed by an article from AAAS SCIENCE ("Warming
May Not Swamp Islands" by Christopher Pala, 1 August 2014), atoll island
nations of the world are very worried about climate change. Consider
Kiribati, a nation consisting of 33 coral atolls, covering an area of ocean
about the size of India, halfway between Hawaii and Fiji. Anote Tong,
Kiribati's president, is so worried about the possibility of his islands
being swamped by rising seas that he bought 22 square kilometers of land in
the Fijis for $8.7 million USD, as living space for displaced Kiribatis.
Other atoll nations, such as Tuvalu and the Maldives, are similarly
concerned.

Many researchers see this as, to a degree, over-reaction. To be sure, there
is a threat: current estimates suggest that the seas will rise at least a
meter by 2100. However, coral atolls are unusual among geological structures
in that they are largely the products of biological activity. As described
by Charles Darwin in the 19th century, a coral atoll begins its life as a
volcano risen from the sea. A coral reef grows around its shorelines, with
the reef building up as the tip of the volcano subsides by erosion back
beneath the waves.

The nature of coral atolls, then, was by no means news, but in the early
years of the climate-change debate, nobody appreciated just how adaptable
they are. In 1999, the World Bank asked geologist Paul Kench -- now head of
the University of Auckland's School of Environment in New Zealand -- to
evaluate the effects of climate change on atoll nations such as the
Kiribatis. Kench initially assumed that they would drown under the rising
seas: "That's what everyone thought, and nobody questioned it."

However, the more Kench investigated, the more he realized that nobody had
ever seriously addressed the question. Working with colleagues, he created a
model to examine what might actually happen. During episodes of high seas,
storm waves will wash over higher and higher sections of an atoll -- but
instead of washing the atolls away, they actually will build it up by
depositing sand produced from broken coral, coralline algae, mollusks, and
foraminifera. Kench also realized that reefs can build up height by 1 to 1.5
centimeters in a year, plenty fast enough to keep up with sea-level rise:
"As long as the reef is healthy and generates an abundant supply of sand,
there's no reason a reef island can't grow and keep up."

That sounds a bit speculative, but cores drilled from coral atolls support
the model. Cores from the island of Jabat in the Marshall Islands show the
atoll emerged 4,000 to 4,800 years ago, when sea levels were rising as fast
as they are now. In addition, aerial photos and satellite images show that,
in general, atolls haven't been much affected by the 15-centimeter rise in
seas over the past half century.

President Tong has played up the threat to the Kiribatis by pointing to
Bikeman Islet off South Tarawa, which is already submerged. However,
researchers believe that Bikeman's problems were due to human activity:
causeways, sand removal, and badly-built seawalls. It was marginal living
space to begin with, and human meddling made it worse.

Although worries that the Kiribatis will disappear seem exaggerated, climate
change is still making trouble for the islanders, or at least those who live
close to the shore. As is the case for low-lying coastal areas around the
world, from the US East Coast to Bangladesh, rising seas mean much more
damaging storm surges. South Tarawa is particularly vulnerable, with salt
water driven in by storms polluting fresh water sources on which the
islanders are dependent. However, even if exclusion zones are set up along
the waterfronts of the Kiribati atolls, there will still be plenty of living
space left for the Kiribatis.

* SENTENCED TO DEATH: On 15 April 2013, the Boston Marathon was rocked by
explosions, with three killed and hundreds injured. The bombers, Chechen
brothers Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, were quickly hunted down; Tamerlan
died in a shootout with the authorities, Dzhokhar was arrested. On 15 May
2015, a Federal jury condemned Dzhokhar Tsarnaev to death by lethal
injection. However, as discussed by an article from BBC WORLD Online ("Does
A Death Sentence Always Mean Death?" by Charlotte McDonald, 23 May 2015),
the odds are not high that he will actually be executed.

Between 1973 and the end of 2013, 8,466 people were sentenced to death in the
USA, but only 1,359, about one in six, were executed. Some didn't live to be
executed, dying in prison, either by natural causes or suicide, while of the
rest:

2,979 remain on death row.

392 had their sentences commuted.

3,194 had their death sentences overturned. It is estimated that of this
group, 152 were exonerated.

The figures are suggestive, particularly for the ratio of people executed to
people exonerated: about one in nine.

18 out of America's 50 states have banned the death penalty, Nebraska being
the latest, having passed the ban this spring. Of the 32 other states where
the death penalty remains in force, Virginia is the most aggressive in
carrying it out, with almost three-quarters of those sentenced to death
actually executed. Appeals in Virginia are limited to 12 months; it is the
only state with such restrictive rules, and the only state where over half
the death sentences are carried out. California, in contrast, has an
execution rate of about 1%.

The US Federal justice system still retains the death penalty, and has
imposed it in the case of Dzhokar Tsarnaev. However, between 1973 and 2013,
the Federal government has only executed three people out of 71 sentenced to
death, with 56 people still on death row. That's less than 1 in 20 actual
executions relative to sentencing; the odds are that Tsarnaev will not
actually be executed.

More than half of all the countries in the world have officially banned the
death penalty, and less than a quarter have used it in the last decade. In
1988, only 35 countries had banned the death penalty; the number is 107
today. Another 52 that still have the death penalty on the books haven't
executed anyone in ten years. Only 39 countries have executed someone in the
past decade, most of them in Africa, the Middle East, and Asia.

While there are emotional arguments both for and against the death penalty,
in the USA it is simply proving unrealistic. Even those who are for the
death penalty admit it is extraordinary, and so is exposed to appeals.
Countries that are fond of the death penalty not only have weak or
effectively nonexistent appeals processes, they may not allow the accused a
reasonable defense in court, or may coerce suspects into false confessions.

Although the numbers of executions in China have fallen substantially, the
death penalty is still popular there, with tales of ghastly miscarriages of
justice. According to one story, a man was executed for murdering his
neighbor, who had disappeared -- but ten years later, the neighbor returned
to the village, alive and well. Not only was the accused not guilty; there
hadn't been a crime.

* CHINA & THE INTERNET (10): The nongovernmental organizations that have
sprung up across China in the last decade are a diverse lot. Some are run by
religious groups, with Christian doctors helping with public health care,
Buddhists helping with the elderly. Others involve groups of citizens
working to address their specific concerns, such as parents of autistic
children, or those who want to assist local education. Money is tight,
wealth in China not being widespread, but philanthropy by those who can
afford it is on the rise.

Government leadership, having accepted that the people have lost
revolutionary fervor for the Red cause -- having taken the capitalist road,
the utopian Red of the Chinese Communist Party has faded considerably -- has
been pleasantly surprised to find that idealism is not dead, and that this
idealism does not, on the face of it, pose a threat to party rule. He Jianyu
of the NGO Research Center in Beijing says the leadership has realized "NGOs
are not all revolutionaries who want to overthrow the party, as they had
thought."

The big boost to NGOs was the devastating 2008 earthquake in Sichuan, in
which 70,000 people died. Thousands of volunteers came in to help, and were
often well more effective than the government. The government bowed to
reality and opened the gates further to NGO registration.

Underlying the emergence of NGO power is the growth of China's middle class.
Yes, increasingly prosperous Chinese want comfortable lives, but at least
some want to participate in creating the new China. The intent to work for
change outside the government suggests a certain lack of confidence in party
rule, the party seen as lacking in ideas, understanding of tactical issues,
and trust from the local community; nobody believes party proclamations any
more. The government has sensibly accepted the implied reprimand, and
decided to co-opt that public spirit under loose party supervision.

That change in mindset, ironically, has come at a time of greater oppression.
Since Xi Jinping became party boss in 2012, the boot has come down heavily on
anyone who dares publicly criticize the exclusive right of the party to rule
China. The leadership, in other words, wants to have their cake and eat it
too, using NGOs to help support the system, while making sure they do nothing
to undermine it. The big bosses will be quick to tighten the leash if things
seem to be going out of control.

From one point of view, that seems to be what Jessica Teets, an American
academic, has neatly labeled "consultative authoritarianism" at work, the
iron fist being discreetly kept out of sight. However, many people working
for NGOs believe that they are quietly transforming the party from within by
challenging the idea, if not the practice, that the party can and should be
in ultimate control.

Wishful thinking? There's no real motion for reform, and party hardliners
have made it clear they have no tolerance for any such "peaceful evolution"
of party ideology. However, that very touchiness over the idea suggests it
carries more weight than they would admit; Chinese working in NGOs, seeing the
wish for change circulating, if discreetly, on China's proprietary internet,
believe that the glacier of Chinese government may appear solid and permanent
-- but that it is slowly being eroded by gentle currents of change
underneath. As the saying goes, nothing can stop an idea whose time is
coming; the most that can be done is slow it down. [END OF SERIES]

* THE COLD WAR (75): More or less secure at the top of the USSR,
Khrushchev took satisfaction in the progress of Soviet missile development.
Sergei Korolyev's OKB-1 missile design bureau was moving forward on the R-7
ICBM, the missile performing its first successful launch on 21 August. A
following launch also went well, with Korolyev then getting permission to
launch the PS-1 satellite on the next shot.

The Americans were making progress as well, though with missteps of their
own. The first launch test of an Atlas was on 11 June, with the missile
veering off course; it was commanded to self-destruct. The Jupiter IRBM,
however, was flying successfully by that time, and the Thor would do so soon.

For the moment, Eisenhower was primarily focused on domestic issues, being
concerned with a noisy fuss over school desegregation in Arkansas. 1957 had
been a fairly quiet year for him on the international scene, but the relative
peace was about to be shattered. On 4 October, a Soviet R-7 missile put the
world's first space satellite, "Sputnik (Fellow Traveler) 1", into orbit.
Khrushchev had judged it would impress the world; the reaction he got from
the US was beyond anything he could have expected.

Since the USSR had already expressed plans to put a satellite into orbit,
Sputnik 1 wasn't really a surprise to the White House; indeed, the president
had received a CIA report in July that said the Soviets were about ready to
launch a satellite. What was a very much a surprise was the hysterical
screaming over the Soviet feat, as if it were a second Pearl Harbor. The
Soviets, so long dismissed as backwards, suddenly had become ten feet tall.

Eisenhower was baffled over the fuss; the US could have already put a
satellite into orbit, had the will been there. Indeed, on 8 October, Defense
Undersecretary Donald Quarles told the president that "the Russians have in
fact done us a good turn, unintentionally, in establishing the freedom of
international space ... "

It does not appear that Khrushchev had considered that implication in his
eagerness to trump the USA. The US government had no intention of objecting
to Sputnik 1's overflights of America; if US satellites, including spy
satellites, then overflew the USSR, the Soviets would be in a difficult
position to object themselves. Eisenhower did not dare raise this point to
the public, however, and the loud howling continued. [TO BE CONTINUED]

-- 05 JUN 15 / COSMOS 2505 (KOBALT M) -- A Soyuz 2-1a booster was
launched from Plesetsk Northern Cosmodrome at 1524 GMT (local time - 4) to
put a "Kobalt M / Yantar 4K2M" class optical reconnaissance film-return
satellite into orbit. The spacecraft was designated "Cosmos 2505"; it was
possibly the last Kobalt M to be launched, the Persona electro-optic
satellites being the way of the future.

-- 22 JUN 15 / SENTINEL 2A -- A European Vega booster was launched from
Kourou in French Guiana to put the ESA "Sentinel 2A" optical Earth
observation satellite into Sun-synchronous near-polar orbit. It had a launch
mass of 1,135 kilograms (2,500 pounds), and carried a payload of
multispectral imagers. Sentinel 2A was the second in the ESA "Copernicus"
series of Earth observation satellites, following the Sentinel 1A radar
satellite, launched in 2014. Sentinel 2A is to be followed by the similar
Sentinel 2B, plus the Sentinel 1B radarsat, and two Sentinel 3 satellites for
ocean surveillance.

-- 23 JUN 15 / COSMOS 2506 (PERSONA) -- A Soyuz 2-1b booster with a Volga
upper stage was launched from Plesetsk at 1644 GMT (local time - 4) to put a
"Persona" electro-optic surveillance satellite into orbit, the spacecraft
being designated "Cosmos 2506". This was the third Persona launch, the first
being in 2008, the second in 2013; the first Persona failed on arrival in
orbit, the second was still operational at last notice.

-- 26 JUN 15 / GAOFEN 3 -- A Long March 4B booster was launched from
Taiyuan at 0622 GMT (local time - 8) to put the "Gaofen 3" Earth observation
satellite into orbit, the third of six such spacecraft for Earth resource
observation.

-- 28 JUN 15 / SPACEX DRAGON CRS7 (FAILURE) -- A SpaceX Falcon 9 booster
was launched from Cape Canaveral at 1421 GMT (local time + 4), carrying the
seventh operational "Dragon" cargo capsule to the International Space Station
(ISS). It was carrying eight "Flock 1f" triple-CubeSat Earth observation
satellites. The launcher disintegrated 139 seconds into flight. This was
the third loss of an ISS cargo vessel in less than a year, putting ISS under
stress.

* OTHER SPACE NEWS: European aerospace giant Airbus Defense & Space has
now announced an alliance with a startup named "OneWeb", backed by Richard
Branson's Virgin Group and wireless tech giant Qualcomm, to create an
"internet in the sky", woven from 900 satellites, to be launched from 2018.

Each OneWeb satellite will weigh less than 150 kilograms (330 pounds); the
satellites will fly in orbits about 1,200 kilometers (745 miles) above Earth.
The constellation will consist of 648 operational satellites, the rest being
ground or orbital spares, with the satellites deployed in 20 orbital planes
to provide continuous global coverage at 50 megabits per second, with a
maximum latency of 30 milliseconds -- equivalent to a cable modem. It will
take about 30 launches to establish the entire constellation.

Established by telecom entrepreneur Greg Wyler and based in Britain's Channel
Islands, OneWeb's satellite constellation will supply private consumers,
businesses, schools, and hospitals with broadband connectivity in the Ku band
through small ground user terminals, which can link nearby phones, computers
and other devices to the global internet. Wyler previously founded O3b
networks, set up to provide broadband services to rural areas. O3b has 12
satellites in orbit today, with telecom companies from Pacific island nations
and Africa among O3b's initial customers.

OneWeb is confronted with competition from SpaceX corporation, whose boss
Elon Musk is pushing his own "internet in the sky" with Google backing. The
SpaceX constellation will consist of 4,000 satellites, with initial
operations expected by 2020. People are keeping an open mind on these
concepts, while being careful to remember that they are long shots -- with
pointed questions being raised about the proliferation of space debris from
so many spacecraft.

* NASA is now planning to launch an "Insight" Mars lander in 2016. The
agency has now decided to fly two nanosats with the mission, which will
provide a data relay capability, relaying status signals from the lander as
it enters the Martian atmosphere.

The secondary mission is named "Mars Cube One (MarCO)", the two nanosats
being based on the popular CubeSat format, if somewhat loosely so: they will
be unprecedented six-unit CubeSats, the size of six single CubeSats, in a 3 x
2 arrangement, and incompatible with standard CubeSat deployer systems. In
launch configuration, they will have dimensions of 36.6 x 24.3 x 11.8
centimeters (14.4 x 9.5 x 4.6 inches), about the size of a large box of
breakfast cereal.

NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory is building the Insight lander -- which will
carry a suite of French and German instruments to detect seismic activity and
study the Martian interior -- and the MarCO nanosats. The mission will be
launched in March 2016 from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, by an
Atlas 5 booster. Mars landing is scheduled for 28 September 2016, after six
and a half months of flight.

The MarCO spacecraft will be stored inside a container attached to the aft
bulkhead of the booster's Centaur upper stage, away from the payload fairing
enclosure housing InSight during ascent. The nanosats will spring-deploy
from the Centaur stage after it releases the InSight spacecraft. The
nanosats will extend two solar panels to generate electricity, and a UHF
receiver antenna and X-band high-gain reflector panel will open to link up
with InSight and ground stations on Earth.

Each nanosat features a cold-gas thruster system to keep it flying right on
the way to Mars. Eight thrusters will adjust the spacecraft's trajectory,
while four smaller jets will control its orientation, working with a trio of
reaction wheels. They will not go into orbit around Mars, simply relaying
data during the nerve-wracking entry sequence, when communications with Mars
landers is traditionally broken. The mission is not reliant on the nanosats,
but they may pave the way for nanosat relays and other orbital assets to be
flown on later Mars missions.

* CHINA IN AFRICA: There's been something of a fuss about the economic
penetration of China into the African continent. As discussed by an article
from THE ECONOMIST ("One Among Many", 17 January 2015), a closer look at the
issue shows the fears are overblown.

It is true that China is by far Africa's biggest trading partner, exchanging
about $160 billion USD worth of goods a year; more than a million Chinese,
most of them laborers and traders, have moved to the continent in the past
decade. However, the African boom that China has helped create is attracting
other investors. The non-Western ones are particularly competitive; African
trade with India is projected to reach $100 billion USD in 2015, up from $57
billion USD in 2013; it is growing at a faster rate than Chinese trade, and
is likely to overtake trade with America. Brazil and Turkey are leapfrogging
many European countries.

If China doesn't seem so big when placed in the context of overall trade with
Africa, it seems puny when it comes to direct investment. In 2012, Britain
invested three times as much as China, while the US invested 50% more, with
Italy only slightly less than that. Chinese businessmen don't feel they're
holding all the cards in Africa, in part because they see their game as
global. According to He Lingguo, a Chinese construction manager in Kenya:
"This is a good place for business, but there are many others around the
world."

He's thinking of moving to Venezuela. Chinese President Xi Jinping has
promised to invest $250 billion USD in Latin America over the coming decade.
In addition, for now China's appetite for commodities has slackened, with the
global market for such tilting to the advantage of buyers instead of sellers.
That may be temporary, since China does have a growing need for agricultural
products and other goods.

There is also the difficulty for the Chinese in that Africans are becoming
more suspicious of them, believing they are pushing dodgy deals and intend
to loot Africa. There is also the problem for China that Africans are
increasingly embracing democracy and open society, while China remains
essentially authoritarian -- if not in a heavy-handed fashion, at least
with a flat refusal to accept democratic principles.

In 2014, citizens of Senegal blocked a deal that would have handed a prime
section of property in the center of the capital, Dakar, to Chinese
developers; in Tanzania, labor unions criticized the government for letting
in Chinese small traders. Some African officials are critical as well,
accusing the Chinese of a "new form of imperialism", in which China takes
commodities from Africa while using Africa as a market for Chinese
manufactured goods. China is increasingly aware of the problem. During a
tour of Africa in January, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi said that China
"absolutely will not take the old path of Western colonists".

China's trade with Africa is big -- but China is negligible when it comes to
aid, and African countries do not look to China for counsel in how to run
their affairs. Africans, having had enough of "Big Man" leaders and their
corrupt statism, are moving increasingly to democracy and free-market
economics, and don't see China as a providing an inspiring example for
either. France and Britain, both in spite of and because of their earlier
colonialist domination of the continent, have far more influence, and the
Americans are generally happy to concede them their leadership role.

Certainly, heavy Chinese investment in Africa hardly precludes other nations
from investing in Africa themselves; the only reason America doesn't invest
more is because there's no perceived need to do so. Chinese immigrants in
Africa laugh at the idea that they could lord it over the locals. On
inspection, few can seriously believe China is likely to dominate Africa;
instead, it amounts to just another foreign investor, trying to find an
advantage.

* TURBOCHARGERS REVISITED: The trend towards smaller, turbocharged
engines for cars has been discussed
here
in the past, last in February of this year. An article from THE ECONOMIST
("The Little Engine That Could", 7 March 2015), provided more details.

Turbochargers, to review, uses the engine exhaust to spin a turbine that
drives a compressor to blow air into the engine inlet, ensuring a faster
rate of fuel burn and more power, with more complete combustion improving
efficiency and reducing emissions. For higher performance, an intercooler
may be placed between the compressor and the engine's inlet manifold, the
intercooler drawing heat out of the compressed air, increasing its density.
In general terms, a turbocharged 1.8-liter four-cylinder gasoline engine can
match the power and torque of a naturally aspirated 3-liter six-cylinder
engine, while consuming 15% less fuel.

Carmakers started to take turbocharging more seriously in 2010, after the US
government announced that its corporate average fuel economy (CAFE) target
would rise to 35.5 miles per US gallon (6.63 liters per 100 kilometers) by
the 2016 model year. Compared to superchargers, which are blowers driven by
the engine drivetrain, turbochargers are more efficient, but they also suffer
from "turbo lag" -- a delay between stepping on the gas and the spin-up of the
turbine.

In Europe, where half of all cars and light trucks sold are diesel models,
turbocharging is common. Diesels ignite their fuel by using the heat of
compression, not spark plugs, and so demand much higher compression ratios.
The higher pressure means a stronger and heavier engine, which ends up
operating at lower RPM than a gasoline engine because the engine's moving
parts are heavier. The lower RPM makes it harder for a diesel engine to
obtain adequate air, and so they have long been fitted with turbochargers.

Turbochargers for gasoline engines have somewhat different requirements from
those used on diesel engines:

Gasoline is more volatile and ignites faster than diesel fuel; it burns
hotter, and it has to be burned using a richer fuel-air ratio.

Gasoline engines also operate over a much wider range of speeds, and
should respond quickly when throttled up. Turbo lag can be treacherous,
with nothing happening for a few seconds, then the acceleration abruptly
surging.

On the other side of that coin, if the driver lets off the gas pedal
abruptly, back-pressure from the engine inlet can damage the turbocharger
system. To guard against this problem, a "blow-off" valve is fitted
between the inlet manifold and the turbocharger.

On the exhaust side, a "wastegate" regulates the turbocharger's
operation by bleeding off some of the hot exhaust gas and bypassing
the turbine.

There are many other fine points to turbocharger design. Making the spinning
parts of a turbocharger smaller allows it to respond more quickly to throttle
changes, but limits the turbocharger's output. Bigger ones have more output,
but of course have poorer response. One of the most popular schemes for
dealing with this quandary is the "twin-scroll" turbocharger, in which the
turbine has separate feeds from the two engine exhaust manifolds. One nozzle
injects exhaust gas at a steeper angle to the turbine blades, for quick
response, while the other injects the exhaust gas at a shallower angle, for
peak performance.

As a further refinement, the two exhaust manifolds can draw off air from the
piston exhaust cycles so that they alternate in their drive to the
turbocharger, ensuring smoother operation and also a more complete exhaustion
of burned gases from the cylinders, improving engine efficiency further.
If the piston engine is a venerable technology, it hasn't run out of new
tricks yet.

* In related news, as discussed by a note from IEEE SPECTRUM Online ("Lasers
Could Boost Engine Efficiency by 27%" by Evan Ackerman, 25 February 2015), we
are so accustomed to the spark plugs that set off the fuel in our auto
engines that we don't stop to wonder if there's a better way. Spark plugs
aren't all that efficient; they ignite the fuel-air mixture in an engine
cylinder from the top, and the cycling of the engine ensures that the burn
won't go fully to completion. That's troublesome for both engine efficiency
and emissions.

The answer? Lasers, which can ignite the fuel-air mixture in the middle of
the cylinder, ensuring a much more complete burn. Lasers can also be fired
with more precise timing, and even several times during a combustion cycle.
The end result is up to 27% better energy efficiency, and lower emissions.

In 2011, Toyota got laser ignition to work in a lab. It was just a
proof-of-concept demonstration, and Toyota didn't pursue matters much
further. However, the US Advanced Research Projects Agency for Energy
(ARPA-E) is now working with a company named Princeton Optronics to develop a
practical laser ignition system. Early in 2015, the firm presented a
functional, laser-ignited automobile engine at an ARPA-E conference. Nobody
involved with the research expects laser ignition to show up in mass-market
vehicles soon, with the technology likely to be first used in aeronautics
or maritime shipping.

* CHINA & THE INTERNET (9): As something of a footnote to this series,
as reported by an article from THE ECONOMIST ("Beneath The Glacier", 12 April
2014), China's peculiar balancing of yin and yan -- liberty and control -- in
its approach to the internet is paralleled by a similar approach to Chinese
nongovernmental organizations (NGO). Traditionally, authoritarian
governments have no patience with nongovernmental activist groups of any
kind, supplanting them with tame government organizations. However, the
Chinese government is not really fond of the iron fist, and now takes a
relatively positive view of NGOs, at least as long they do nothing to
distress the party.

For example, consider the Chinese NGO named the "Panyu Migrant Workers'
Service" in Panyu, a suburb of the southern city of Guangzhou. The NGO is
run by one Zeng Feiyang to help defend the rights of workers in the factories
of Guandong province. Zeng is used to being harassed for his work; he has
been evicted, had his utilities shut off, and been bullied by local
authorities or their minions. Zeng was then startled when last fall he got a
call from an official, Zeng saying: "The man asked if I wanted to register
the NGO. I was very surprised."

Over the past three years, the authorities have been calling up NGOs to talk
over registration with them. It sounds on the face of it like a mere
bureaucratic paperwork issue, but the change in mindset is significant. At
the moment, over half a million NGOs are registered with the state. To be
sure, some of these were actually set up the state, while some are fake front
operations run to pry money out the state -- China has plenty of activists,
but it also has plenty of scammers. Of the legitimate registered NGOs, as a
strong rule they are engaged in noncontroversial activities.

There are an estimated 1.5 million unregistered NGOs, whose activities are
viewed by the government with varying degrees of apprehension. They
represent social forces bubbling up from below in a state that thinks in
top-down terms. Government leadership understands that the NGOs partly
represent a threat, but also represent an opportunity to obtain energy out of
citizen activism, and has been liberalizing the rules accordingly.

Not surprisingly, there are limits to liberalization. Those NGOs that, say,
provide services to groups such as the poor, the elderly, and the disabled,
are encouraged. Those that have a clearly political agenda, particularly in
promoting religious, ethnic, or labor rights, are strongly discouraged.
However, there has been a degree of cautious relaxation on that front as
well. If such activism poses no real threat to party rule, it works as a
social safety valve, letting off public pressure.

* After Mao Zedong's Communists took over China in 1949, all groups operating
outside of the party's control, such as religions and trade unions, were
suppressed; there was even an attempt to undermine the Chinese dedication to
the extended family, though that was doomed to failure. The state set up
organizations of its own that had the appearance of citizen groups, such as
the China Youth Development Foundation, with such outfits known by the
unintentionally comical label of "government-operated NGOs (GONGO)".

After the suppression of the 1989 Tiananmen protests, the state relaxed a
bit, telling the citizens that whatever wasn't forbidden wasn't mandatory:
if people were careful not to rock the boat, they could pretty much do what
they pleased. The subsequent collapse of Soviet control over Eastern Europe
and the fall of the USSR did revive caution in Chinese leadership, but NGOs
were not completely suppressed, with those working on environmental issues
and HIV-AIDs benefiting. NGOs were still often harassed, with a particularly
strong clampdown after the 2005 "color" revolutions in Ukraine, Georgia, and
Kyrgyzstan.

Since then, the state has been on the path of relaxation. Rapid urbanization
has put a strain on the party's ability to provide services to the people,
while citizen expectations have grown; the central government has reacted by
trying to shift responsibilities onto local governments, which may be too
strapped or too indifferent to respond. If NGOs can help keep the Chinese
people happy, that means less stress on the party. The number of NGOs
began to increase rapidly.

In 2011, the government specified four types of NGOs that could register:
industry associations, science & technology organizations, charities, and
those that provide social services. Until 2012, any NGO that wanted to
register and be legal had to have a sponsoring government organization,
typically a government agency that worked in the NGO's domain of interest.
That ensured tight control over NGOs -- or "social organizations" as the
government calls them, "non-government" having uncomfortable overtones of
"anti-government". That rule has now been relaxed as well. [TO BE
CONTINUED]

* THE COLD WAR (74): Premier Khrushchev's primary concern at that time
was not nuclear testing, but a challenge to his authority, from members of
the Council of Ministers who wanted to dislodge him from his dominant
position. On 18 June 1957, he was summoned to a meeting of the council, to
find himself under attack by Malenkov, Molotov, Bulganin, and others, with
his critics demanding that he step down as party secretary. Taken by
surprise, he admitted to some errors, but fought back on other fronts.
Nonetheless, when he went home that evening, he was obviously distraught and
worried about the future.

The next day, however, Khrushchev came back swinging, blasting back at his
adversaries, matching them blow for blow. That evening, he set up a plenum
of the Party Central Committee, to which the Council of Ministers was in
principle responsible, and arranged for senior committee members to be flown
into Moscow immediately. By the end of the next day, the plotters were in
retreat; the Central Committee plenum began on 22 June with bitter
denunciations against them.

Defense Minister Zhukov led the charge, saying that Malenkov and Molotov were
among the most prominent of Stalin's henchmen in "arrests and executions of
party and state cadres." The uproar went on for six days, with accusations
and counter-accusations flying back and forth. When Molotov declared that
all members of the Politburo were implicated in Stalin's crimes, Khrushchev
shot back at him that as "second in command", Molotov bore the "main
responsibility". Molotov stood his ground: "But I raised more objections to
Stalin than any of you did, Comrade Khrushchev!"

The debate, such as it was, echoed Khrushchev's denunciations of Stalin a
year earlier -- but it was hardly an indictment of Stalin's regime. Having
been forced to acknowledge that the frontal attack on Stalin had been, to a
large degree, a mistake, Khrushchev had no intention of pressing the issue of
past crimes any more than necessary. Indeed, at one point, Khrushchev
effectively admitted that he was still in awe of Stalin: "Why do you all
keep on about Stalin this, Stalin that? All of us taken together aren't
worth Stalin's shit!"

The raucous plenum ended on 28 June, with the plotters cowed and subdued.
Khrushchev was triumphant, crowing at them, saying that Bulganin had ended up
"on a pile of manure." He sneered at them: "And you call yourself
politicians? No, you're just pathetic schemers."

The Party Central Committee, so long drained of power, had reasserted itself,
thanks to Khrushchev's agile maneuvers. Khrushchev, having been
underestimated by the opposition and then vanquishing them, had bounced back
from his doubts, to be more sure than ever of his authority. Too much so, in
fact; even family members noted that from that time on, he would become
increasingly imperious in his decision-making, indifferent to the concerns of
other Soviet leaders, disinterested in reality checks. In growing more
confident of his position, Khrushchev ended up doing much to erode it.

* In China, Mao Zedong was taking actions to consolidate his own position.
He had expected that encouraging citizens to speak out through the Hundred
Flowers Campaign would help establish his authority, the people demanding
that things be done the way Mao wanted to see them done. Of course; did
not the Chinese people love him? Was he not praised to the skies wherever he
went? Mao was unpleasantly surprised by what really happened: Chinese
people wrote letters to the authorities and put up posters on "Democracy
Walls', criticizing the Chinese Communist Party for its authoritarianism and
corruption, protesting government repression, and calling for a multi-party
democracy.

That was not at all what Mao had in mind when he began the exercise, and in
July 1957, Mao ordered a crackdown, what would become the "Anti-Rightist
Campaign". Intellectuals were targeted as "Rightists", to be publicly
criticized and shamed; or demoted; or sent to penal camps; or, it seems in
some cases, shot. Mao declared he had simply been encouraging dissidents to
show themselves so they could be dealt with, saying he had "enticed the
snakes out of their caves."

That was rationalization after the fact, but it was neither here nor there.
Mao never wanted anything resembling an honestly democratic society, in which
different points of view would contend; the Chinese Communist Party would run
things, and the Chinese people would do what the party told them to do. Mao
would never again suggest to the Chinese public that dissent was welcome, and
few Chinese thought independent thinking would be good for their well-being.
[TO BE CONTINUED]

* GIMMICKS & GADGETS: Although movie theaters have increasingly gone to
digital projectors, replacing the cumbersome distribution of cans of film
with digital downloads, as discussed by an article from THE ECONOMIST ("The
Next Picture Show", 6 December 2014), digital movies have their drawbacks.
They don't quite match the detail and contrast of a good 35-millimeter print
-- and worse, the xenon lamps that provide illumination for digital movies
tend to fade, losing half their brightness in a few hundred hours. They cost
$1,500 USD to replace. It's even worse for 3D movies, since the projector
has to cast two images with different polarizations, the 3D glasses only
allowing one image to reach each eye -- cutting total brightness in half.

The solution? Laser-illuminated digital projectors, which promise not only
bright images, but also better contrast, more natural colors, high frame
rates, and resolutions that could approach those of a good 35-millimeter
print. Laser diodes, in contrast with xenon lamps, last tens of thousands of
hours and generate uniform light in specific bands. They are more efficient
as well. The first commercial laser movie projectors use hundreds of laser
diodes, offering about twice the brightness -- 60,000 lumens -- of
xenon-based projectors, while consuming only half as much electricity.

Other advantages of laser projectors are that they can produce a wider range
of colors than xenon lamp projectors; they have better contrast; they
can handle frame rates faster than the traditional 24 frames per second,
giving better action imagery; and they can support advanced 3D projection
schemes. Advocates believe laser projectors will ultimately rival the best
35-millimeter film.

So what's the catch? Price, mostly. A xenon lamp projector might cost
$60,000 USD, but a first-generation laser projector can run to $500,000 USD.
Even factoring in savings in electricity and replacement lamps, laser
projectors end up costing two to four times as much. Since digital
projection benefited distributors, they helped foot the bill for theaters to
go digital; theater operators can't count on such assistance with laser
projectors. A few high-end cinemas have gone laser, but most theaters are
hanging back. The Digital Cinema Initiatives (DCI) group, set up by the
movie studios in 2002 to push digital movie projectors, has not yet endorsed
next-generation movie standards, so nobody's sure when the new laser age will
arrive.

* Wireless networking for households and facilities has an interesting
synergy with lighting systems; since light fixtures are distributed through
all the rooms in a building and provide power, they can also support wireless
modules without any need for additional wiring. A startup named Terralux is
now offering LED light fixtures that incorporate wireless modules, along with
sensors, with the wireless / lighting network being controlled by a PC,
tablet, or smartphone.

Customers can choose what sensors they want in the fixtures. Along with the
high efficiency of LEDs, the network controller can adjust lighting as needed
by the presence of humans, as determined by the sensors. The fixtures are
spendy at present, but Terralux executives say they expect prices to fall as
LEDs do, and they gain manufacturing experience.

* As discussed by a note from BLOOMBERG BUSINESSWEEK ("Mastering The Art of
Palm Reading" by Olga Kharif, 12 March 2015), the increasing use of biometric
identification -- fingerprints, palm-vein, and retinal patterns -- in
commerce has led crooks to take countermeasures, some of them drastic. In
Brazil, banks began to introduce ATMs with fingerprint readers; no problem
for the crooks, they just started cutting off fingers. The push now is
towards palm-vein readers, which won't work with a severed hand.

It is estimated that by 2020 every smartphone, tablet, and wearable device
will have an embedded biometric sensor, compared to fewer than 7% today.
Banking and e-commerce are driving biometrics; it is estimated that by 2020,
half of all mobile payments and 10% of in-store payments will use biometric
ID. Even now, however, fraud rates on transactions using Apple Pay are high,
since it's not hard for criminals to link their own fingerprints to a stolen
charge-card number.

Few companies that have introduced biometric ID schemes ever thought they
were foolproof, and knew in practice they would necessarily a component of a
cross-matrix of validations -- for example, it's only possible to cheat on
Apple Pay because the transaction systems aren't smart enough to know what
charge-card numbers really should go with what fingerprints. Retailers and
banks have an incentive to warehouse fingerprints; over the long run,
biometric ID might be better stored in a central bank in the cloud.

Over the long run, it's likely we'll be better off with biometrics, but
there's going to be a tricky learning curve until we wring the bugs out of
it. Once that's done, then on the other side of that coin, we are
permanently stuck with the fact that, by using fingerprints or other
biometric ID, we've made our actions just that much more traceable, and
there's not a lot we can do about it. Be careful what you ask for: you may
just get it.

* ROBOTAXIS: As discussed by an article from IEEE SPECTRUM Online
("Robot Taxis Will Reshape Urban Landscapes" by Willie Jones, 29 April
2015), a team of researchers at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and
Development's International Transport Forum has released a study of the
possible effects of self-driving cars on urban traffic. What they found is
that robocars will have a dramatic effect on cities, allowing major parcels
of land now dedicated to transport to be turned over to recreational and
commercial use.

The study imagined what might happen when all human-driven cars are replaced
by a mix of shared and semi-private robocars in a midsize European city. The
researchers used computer models based on data from actual trips in Lisbon,
Portugal, with the models based on robocars -- either "TaxiBots", being
robotaxis that would pick up multiple riders, or "AutoVots", which would be
single-passenger vehicles. The models assumed that the TaxiBots and AutoVots
would replace all car and bus trips, while performing exactly the same trips
as current vehicles. The models determined:

The total number of vehicles on the road.

How many trips would be made, including trips with unoccupied vehicles.

The total mileage of the trips.

The number of parking spaces the city would need.

The results were startling: robocars, combined with high-capacity public
transport such as light rail, would provide the same mobility inside a
midsize European city, but with only 10% of the number of cars on the roads
today; even without mass transit, a city's populace could be hauled around
with nearly 80% fewer cars than are registered now.

In addition, commute times would be reduced by 10% during rush hour, while
the reduced need for parking -- on the average, currently a car spends over
90% of its time parked -- would free up the "equivalent to 210 football
fields, or nearly 20% of the street space in our model city."

* We appear to be sliding into an era of rapid and revolutionary change in
personal transport. What is particularly significant is that it's happening
incrementally; while a fully robotic car would be a nice thing, nobody
expects that to happen in the near future, and right now people are happy
with the partial solution they can get. According to a note from WIRED
Online blogs, a JD Power survey of 5,300 people on smart cars found
particular enthusiasm for five technologies:

Collision mitigation.

Night vision.

Blind spot detection.

Rearview cameras.

Self-healing paint.

Things consumers aren't so concerned about include gesture recognition for
automotive control, driver monitoring, and haptic touch screens. Older
drivers tend to prefer an automated car that acts as a driving assistant,
while younger drivers are more interested in full automation.

In a related note from WIRED, a Swiss firm named WayRay is working on a
driver navigation scheme named "Navion". Smartphone navigation apps are
readily available, but it's not so convenient to drive, while keeping an eye
on the smartphone. Navion envisions a little box mounted on the dashboard
that projects navigation information and safety alerts on the windscreen;
it's a little like turning driving into a video game. WayRay is talking
about pre-orders later in 2015.

WIRED also had an item on Zonar of Seattle, a firm that provides intelligent
tools for the trucking industry. In 2014, Zonar introduced an Android-based
tablet that drivers can use to track their hours, ensure they complete their
inspections, exchange messages with dispatchers, and get truck-specific
navigation -- avoiding low bridges, for example. Relevant data is sent to
trucker dispatch centers, reducing the need for physical paperwork.

Zonar also helps with fuel economy, which is significant because fuel bills
for a single vehicle can hit $8,000 USD. Driver behavior influences fuel
economy, and so Zonar provides guidance by "gamifying" the experience,
providing realtime feedback on how efficiently on how the driver's doing, and
how to do better: Shift now! Don't slam on the gas pedal! This is a
trick pioneered by passenger cars: some hybrids and electrics, like the
Chevy Volt and Ford Fusion Hybrid, tell drivers how much energy they
recapture through regenerative braking, for example, encouraging more
efficient driving.

Efficient drivers are also safer, partly because they tend to be more "tuned
in". The tablet's font size and lighting are designed for use in a truck
cab. There are no frills, and although drivers don't get to download games,
they find the tablet makes their job easier, and is not hard to use. Most of
them have smartphones and know their way around Android in the first place.
It's hard to say that the Zonar tech defines a "smart truck" -- but it
certainly clearly demonstrates the incremental nature of the "intelligent
transport revolution."

* TOWARDS A CLIMATE CHANGE PACT: According to a NEW YORK TIMES article
("Global Climate Pact Gains Momentum as China, US and Brazil Detail Plans" by
Coral Davenport, 30 June 2015), nations working to deal with climate change
have been outlining their plans for doing so, preparatory to a climate summit
in Paris in December. Under a United Nations (UN) accord reached in Peru in
December 2014, every nation is to submit a plan for cutting carbon emissions
in preparation for the upcoming summit, the plans to be used as a basis for
constructing an agreement.

China, the world's largest greenhouse gas emitter, submitted a 16-page plan
to the UN on 29 June that detailed how the country intends to alter its
economy to reduce fossil fuel emissions by 2030. On the same day, President
Dilma Rousseff of Brazil, one of the top 10 carbon emitters, and President
Obama of the US announced in Washington DC that their nations had agreed to
expand electricity generation from renewable sources.

South Korea, Serbia, and Iceland also submitted their plans for cutting
emissions on 29 June, joining the 40 or so countries that had already done
so, including Canada, Mexico, Russia, and the United States, along with the
European Union. Brazil has not yet submitted its climate plan to the UN,
with plans still pending from other carbon emitters, including India and
Japan.

The joint announcement by Brazil and the US committed the two nations to
increase the use of wind, solar, and geothermal energy to provide 20% of
national electrical production by 2030. That would double renewable power's
contribution in Brazil, and triple it in the US. Brazil also committed to
restore over 120,000 square kilometers (47,000 square miles) of Amazon rain
forest, an area about the size of the US state of Pennsylvania. Obama said
he was pleased with the agreement: "Following progress during my trips to
China and India, this shows that the world's major economies can begin to
transcend some of the old divides and work together to confront the common
challenge that we face -- something that we have to work on for future
generations."

China and the US, the world's biggest greenhouse gas emitters, have long been
seen as the critical players in a global climate change deal. Progress
towards such a deal seem stalled until November 2014, when Obama and Chinese
President Xi Jinping jointly announced that the United States would lower its
emissions up to 28% from 2005 levels by 2025, while China's emissions would
peak and then begin to fall no later than 2030.

This March, Obama submitted a plan to the UN detailing how the United States
would meet its target, saying it would rely on enactment of Environmental
Protection Agency regulations on emissions from cars, trucks, and power
plants. China's plan is based on a broad commitment to decouple economic
growth from the use of fossil fuels -- China is notoriously dependent on
coal, the dirtiest of all major fossil fuels, for electricity production --
and to improve efficiency of production in terms of carbon emissions by up to
65% from 2005 levels by 2030. China is also working towards a national
cap-and-trade system, emissions in which companies must pay for emission
permits, and can buy and sell those permits among themselves.

In his first term, Obama tried and failed to push a similar cap-and-trade
system through Congress. Republican members of Congress have consistently
opposed any climate change deal. The UN is working on a $10 billion USD
"Green Climate Fund" to assist developing nations to deal with climate
change; Obama has pledged $3 billion USD, more than any other nation, but
Congress refuses to let go of the money.

Even if a climate deal along the lines of the plans submitted so far to the
UN gets passed this December, few climate researchers believe that it will
halt a rise rise in global temperature of 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees
Fahrenheit), which will lead to extreme storms, droughts, food shortages,
water shortages, and rising sea levels.

However, nobody concerned about climate change is unhappy at the prospect of
an imperfect deal, since it will give a basis for further diplomacy on the
subject. It's the way diplomacy works; a step at a time, building confidence
with each step. Christiana Figueres, the top United Nations climate change
official, said: "It's not a one-shot deal. It's like a highway, with each
country going in the lane with the speed that they can go. Some will start
out slowly and speed up later. It will be a progressive process over time."

* CHINA & THE INTERNET (8): A high-level inspection of China's internet
yields a mixed picture, of well-tuned control of a system that is straining
to break out of it. The government is holding their own far better than
anyone could have expected at the outset, with the government use of the
internet to spread the official message providing a lever to balance the
forces of disruption.

The restlessness of China's citizens has been growing in the 21st century.
Development has generally raised the wealth of the people, in a few cases to
stratospheric levels, but it has inevitably been accompanied by problems:
corruption, income inequality, pollution, food-safety scares. Incidents of
mass unrest have risen dramatically in the past two decades. Even prosperous
Chinese worry that their gilded age cannot last.

If there is going to be an upheaval eventually, it's not easy to see China's
internet as encouraging it. The government has made China's internet a great
and profitable playground for gaming, chat, videos, shopping, and all other
amusements; a cage, the bars not all that visible. The government, instead
of trying to completely suppress dissent online, has simply muffled it,
making it more trouble than it's worth to most Chinese, and drowning it out
with the official message disseminated online.

China's internet does promote democracy of a sort, in that the government
uses it to track public opinion and will make changes in response to public
concerns -- though not to the extent of even contemplating any deep
modifications of the political system. Changes will come, slowly or quickly,
but when history books about the present period are finally written, the
internet may well turn out to have been an agent not of political upheaval in
China, but of authoritarian adaptation before the upheaval, building up
expectations for better government, while delaying the political
transformations needed to deliver it.

The Chinese Communist Party is firm in its belief in its right to rule China,
insecure in its refusal to accept competition, or any other substantial
checks on its authority; this contradiction is unlikely to be resolved in the
near future. For the present, the Chinese example is most useful in showing
how government involvement in the internet can go wrong, reaching beyond mere
following of trends and public communications, to pervasive snooping and a
carefully calibrated chokehold on communications. Although there are serious
issues over government intrusion into and surveillance of the internet in the
US as well, it's not in the same league; in America, the issues can be
discussed publicly.

As far as the penetration of Chinese hackers into computers around the Earth
-- for the time being, that's just the way the world works, pointing to the
need for refining security, until the time comes that the world can
collectively come up with and agree on a fix. That may not be in the near
future. [TO BE CONTINUED]

* THE COLD WAR (73): President Eisenhower talked to Admiral Strauss of
the AEC on 14 June 1957, with a number of physicists in attendance, notably
Edward Teller. Teller reassured the president that, thanks to the PLUMBOB
tests, the US would soon have effectively "clean" nuclear weapons that didn't
generate fallout. Teller was no doubt sincere in believing so -- anyone as
single-minded as Teller was always sincere, no matter what came out of his
mouth -- but the "clean" Bomb was something of a non-starter, there being
serious questions over just how "clean" such a weapon was. More importantly,
a clean Bomb was inevitably substantially less powerful than an conventional
Bomb. The military, in consequence, never wanted clean Bombs, and there
really wasn't any other customer for the Bombs.

Teller, having been briefed by Strauss, then went on to say that, with clean
bombs, it would be possible to use them for peaceful purposes, such as
digging canals or harbors, and even to "modify the weather on a broad basis
through changing the dust content of the air." Although it wasn't clear
there were really customers for such applications, and a later generation
would find such claims dubious at the very least, there was a certain public
enthusiasm for "Our Friend The Atom" in the 1950s -- and Eisenhower, as his
"Atoms For Peace" initiative had demonstrated, was very interested in
peaceful uses of atomic energy.

The president was receptive to the message of the physicists, but skeptical
enough to hedge his bets on fallout, asking the scientists if a test ban
would be sensible. The answer was strong NO -- why, of course the Soviets
would cheat on it. What about, Eisenhower suggested, sharing the results of
PLUMBOB with the Soviets, so they could build their own clean Bombs? The
answer was an even more emphatic NO, there was no way America was going to
give nuclear secrets to the USSR; had Truman made such a suggestion, he would
have been called a traitor. Teller added that, after clean bombs were
developed, it would be possible to add materials "to produce radioactive
fallout if desired."

It is unlikely that Eisenhower, having established that he wanted to solve
the fallout problem, was keen on the idea of making more fallout. The notion
of the "dirty Bomb" would lead to the "cobalt Bomb", in which a nuclear
weapon was given a jacket of cobalt-60 metal to produce additional fallout.
The "cobalt Bomb" was also a non-starter; it wasn't that much dirtier than an
ordinary Bomb, the radiation effects were just more lingering, and the
military was never enthusiastic about it, either.

Eisenhower was suspicious of the sales job he was getting from the atomic
scientists, expressing exasperation in an NSC meeting about how every science
team that gave him advice was eager to obtain deadly new toys. He expressed
the wish that he could find a team that "would recommend programs which we
could dispense with." However, he chose to continue with testing; Strauss
was adept at controlling access of atomic scientists to the president, and so
Eisenhower's only source of counsel on nuclear weapons was Teller and those
of like mind. The president could only go on the advice he had.

The Eisenhower Administration continued to go through the motions of
presenting nuclear disarmament proposals -- but they were skewed to
maintaining American nuclear superiority, ensuring a lack of enthusiasm among
the Soviets. As far as a test ban went, the Soviets did suggest a temporary
moratorium, as opposed to a complete ban, a notion that appealed to
Eisenhower. However, Strauss, Teller, and the other nuclear scientists in
the AEC clique came to the White House to protest -- with Teller also
informing the Joint Congressional Committee on Atomic Energy, with his usual
modest understatement, that a moratorium would be a "crime against humanity",
since it would halt work on clean bombs. Khrushchev was rightfully scornful
of all such talk about "clean" bombs: "How can you have a clean bomb to do
dirty things?"

There was talk between the US and USSR about slowing down the nuclear arms
race, but it wasn't gaining any traction. Although there was considerable
public opposition to nuclear testing among the citizens of Europe, the
governments of Britain and France were strongly opposed to a test ban as
well, since it would hobble their own nuclear ambitions. London and Paris
were still careful to only protest against a test ban in private, keeping a
low profile on the issue in public, implicitly shifting the burden to the US.
To Eisenhower, that was a shrug; he was happy to see Britain and France help
take up the nuclear burden, and if they had to keep a low profile doing it,
that wasn't a serious problem. If that implied making the US look like the
"bad cop", Eisenhower was too self-assured to worry about it much. [TO BE
CONTINUED]

* SCIENCE NOTES: Trying to determine when life arose on Earth has
necessarily proven troublesome, since it's hard to identify fossils of
micro-organisms. As reported by a note from AAAS SCIENCE Online, for a long
time, a 3.46-billion-year-old rock from Western Australia seemed to hold the
record. The "Apex chert", as it was known, contained tiny, wormy structures
could have been fossilized cell walls of early cyanobacteria.

A new study casts substantial doubt on the Apex chert "fossils". It appears
that the elongated filaments were instead created by minerals forming in
hydrothermal systems. After the filaments were formed, carbon accumulated on
the edges, leaving behind an organic signature that suggested cell walls.
That means the oldest known fossils are about a percent younger -- the
3.43-billion-year-old Strelley Pool formation, also from Western Australia,
which provides stronger evidence of microfossils: hollow, bag-shaped bodies
arranged in chains or clusters.

* As discussed by a note from AAAS SCIENCE Online ("Human Skeleton Has Become
Lighter Over Time" by Lizzie Wade, 22 December 2014), a chimpanzee's bones
are considerably denser than those of modern humans, being packed with with
microscopic structures known as "spongy bone". The lack of spongy bone in
humans makes their bodies lighter, but also makes their bones easier to
break. Why the difference between the two species?

Two papers from the PROCEEDINGS OF THE NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES published
in December 2014 probed into the matter. In the first paper, the authors
compared skeletons from modern chimpanzees, the early human ancestor
Australopithecus africanus, Neandertals, early Homo sapiens, and
today's modern humans. They found that chimps, Australopithecus,
Neandertals, and even the early modern humans had much higher densities of
spongy bone than today's humans, suggesting that modern humans are
"domesticated", insulated from the need to hunt and forage, meaning they
don't need such heavy bones.

The second paper compared the density of spongy bone in the hip joints of
nonhuman primates, ancient hunter-gatherers, and ancient farmers. The
hunter-gatherers' hip joints were about as strong as those of the apes, while
the ancient farmers' hips showed significant loss of spongy bone. The hint
in this study is that humans may not have evolved to have lightweight bones;
if we were forced to revert to a primitive life-style that kept us active all
day, we'd likely revert to heavier bones as well.

* The fact that Yellowstone National Park in the state of Wyoming is a
volcanic caldera, essentially one huge volcano -- discussed
here
in 2008 -- that occasionally undergoes massive eruptions is a source of
uneasiness to those of us who don't live so far away from it. As discussed
by a note from AAAS SCIENCE ("Two Huge Magma Chambers Spied Beneath
Yellowstone National Park" by Eric Hand, 23 April 2015), researchers are
keeping an eye on it; geoscientists have now completely imaged the
subterranean plumbing system underneath Yellowstone and have found not just
one, but two magma chambers underneath the giant volcano.

Scientists had already known about a magma "plume" that brings molten rock
up from deep in the mantle to a region about 60 kilometers (37 miles) below
the surface. They had also imaged a shallow magma chamber about 10
kilometers (6 miles) below the park, containing about 10,000 cubic kilometers
(2,400 cubic miles) of molten material; eruptions occur when the material is
ejected from this chamber. Now they have found another chamber, 4.5 times
larger, between that and the plume, from 20 to 50 kilometers (12 and 31
miles) below the surface.

This discovery gives no greater worries of an eruption. The last major
eruption was 640,000 years ago, there's no sign another one will happen any
time soon, and the major current concern is earthquakes. However, the deeper
chamber does imply that the shallow chamber can be replenished again and
again, leading to the eruption of far more material.

Researchers used seismometers to probe the Earth below Yellowstone, tracking
the propagation of earthquake waves. When earthquakes pass through liquid
material, seismic waves slow down, with these low-velocity regions
interpreted as magma chambers -- although these chambers are still mostly
solid rock, with only a small fraction of liquid melt. 11 seismometers from
the EarthScope USArray -- discussed
here
in 2010 -- were used to listen to deep quakes, and 69 seismometers from
several local seismic networks gathered data from shallower earthquakes. The
study will enhance our understanding of the Yellowstone caldera, and our
ability to predict its future behavior.

* ANOTHER MONTH: According to TIME magazine online, the state of New
Jersey is working to clamp down on "dead driving". A state audit in March
revealed the Motor Vehicle Commission had issued official documents, such as
licenses, to more than 300 people no longer among the living. A proposed law
would require the Commission to cross-check records with the Social Security
Administration databases to avoid issuing legal documents to the deceased.
If we must fear the walking dead, at least we won't have to worry about them
behind the wheel.

* I had been using Amazon's Cover Creator app to build covers for my Amazon
Kindle ebooks. I finally got to looking at the covers I had and thought:
These are sorry -- I could put together much better covers myself.

I have a collection of old racy detective paperback covers that I retouched
on Flickr, and I'd also added a few simple fake covers that I brewed up
myself. I decided to use the fakes for inspiration in cooking up my own
ebook covers, and quickly got one thrown together. It looked good, much
better than what I had; I put other things on the back burner, and knocked
out covers for all 21 of my ebooks as quickly as I could. They were all
evolved from a common general configuration -- edition number at top right,
then title, then an image, then author at the bottom -- with variations as
per ebook type, and for individual ebooks as seemed useful. Once I acquired
a few covers as templates, it was easy to modify them for other ebooks.

I was thinking that I might get a bit of extra sales from the better covers,
but didn't want to get my hopes up, particularly since I would have no way to
sort out a slight increase in sales. It's not certain that I did, but I had
a record sales month in June, selling an average of more than one ebook a
day, despite the fact that June isn't supposed to be a big book sales month.
I'm very interested in seeing what happens in August, traditionally one of
the top sales months.

Publishing ebooks has, incidentally, made me more reticent in face-to-face
communications, and I'm not all that forward to begin with. The pocket
change I'm picking up is all very good, but there's also the fact that there
are people out there who are interested enough in what I have to say to
actually pay money to read it. How cool is that? It's also interesting to
me that well more people read hobbyist material like AIRBUS JETLINERS, than
meatier historical or scientific fare.

That then poses the question of why I would bother to say things to people
that they would never think of paying any money for. The end point of such
idle discussions seems to usually be tiresome disputes over politics,
religion, and such, with questions posed to me along the lines of: "What do
you think about that?!" -- to which I reply: "It's all very complicated; or
it's all very simple; or maybe it's both; or neither."

Unfortunately, that ends up picking a fight, or at least inflaming the fight
already in progress. Such considerations, of course, do not rule out the
polite small talk I use to lubricate interactions with others, nor does it
suggest that maintaining my open websites is a waste of time. People only
read my blog if they damn well feel like it, and that teaches me the
necessary humility of being a writer: The customer is always right. I
can do things on the websites that would be too inconsequential to sell, or
too elaborate to cram into an ebook, and the websites give me a feedstock
that I can use to produce ebooks; the websites and ebooks complement each
other. Besides, I do get donations every now and then.

* Thanks to one reader for a donation to support the websites last month.
It is very much appreciated.